Wordorigins.org

Major League Team Names

Dave Wilton, Wednesday, May 16, 2018

It’s called the “great American pastime,” and baseball has been an integral part of life in the United States for, give or take, the last 160 years. So here are the origins of the names of the Major League Baseball teams, past and present.

For those not familiar with the structure of American professional baseball, the Major League Baseball consists of, and has consisted of since the early days of the twentieth century, two leagues, the National League (founded 1876) and the American League (founded 1901). But at various times, particularly in the nineteenth century, other leagues existed, and I make reference to them below when needed. There are also a number of minor leagues, which now exist primarily as “farm” teams to develop player talent for the majors. And until the middle of the twentieth century, professional baseball in the U.S. was segregated, with African-Americans not permitted to play in the two major leagues. There were separate Negro leagues, with the best teams every bit the equal in player quality with the white, major league teams. Following the integration of baseball with Jackie Robinson playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the Negro leagues folded. Where I could find the information, I’ve included the origins of Negro league team names.

The dates listed after the team names are the dates the name came into baseball use, not the date the modern organization that currently uses the name was founded.

Oakland Athletics (1859). Athletics is probably the oldest sports team name still in use, dating to 1859 when an amateur Philadelphia team dubbed themselves the Athletics. The name was used, off and on, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century for a number of professional, Philadelphia teams. The modern American League franchise played in Philadelphia (1901-54) and Kansas City (1954-67) before landing in Oakland in 1968. Since moving to the Bay Area, the name has alternated back and forth between Athletics and A’s, depending on the whim of the moment.

plead, pleaded, pled

Dave Wilton, Monday, May 14, 2018

The verb to plead, meaning to make an appeal or argument, especially in a legal setting, comes to us from the Anglo-Norman French plaider. It makes its English appearance in the thirteenth century. The verb would be just another unremarkable borrowing from French following the Norman Conquest, but the verb has two past-tense and past-participial forms, pleaded and pled, and there is often wrangling over which is correct.

Both past-tense forms are equally old, so neither has primacy of age. But the irregular form pled disappeared in standard British usage, being retained only in Scottish and other dialects, but not before it made its way across the Atlantic and becoming firmly planted in American English. So in North America, both pleaded and pled can be found in both spoken and written English. Neither one can be considered “incorrect,” although the regular pleaded is by far the more common form.

Is Two Better Than One?

Dave Wilton, Tuesday, May 08, 2018

My Facebook feed has filled with people posting about this Washington Post article about a study that purportedly shows that “science” has shown that typing two spaces after a period is superior to typing just one. The number of spaces that should follow a period is one of those eternal topics of debate, with peevers and pedants on both sides assuredly proclaiming that their position is the correct one, but almost never with any evidence to show that they are, in fact, correct. So the idea that a study has definitively settled the question would be a welcome relief. The trouble is, the study in question does no such thing.

April fool

Dave Wilton, Wednesday, April 25, 2018

No one knows the origin of April Fool’s Day or the expression April fool. The expression appears in the seventeenth century, and the association of the month April with fools, especially those foolish because of love or lust, appears to have arisen on the European continent and was imported to Britain in the seventeenth century.

The Oxford Comma and the Law

Dave Wilton, Friday, February 09, 2018

The legal dispute between the Oakhurst Dairy and its drivers has been settled. As widely reported in the media, the dispute hinged on the use, or omission, of the Oxford comma. But the media, or at least the New York Times, is still getting it wrong. The ambiguity in the law was never just about the Oxford comma. The court ruled that the law as a whole was badly worded and ambiguous and made its ruling based on the legislative intent of the law, not the punctuation.

The latest New York Times article says that because of the settlement we’ll never get a legal ruling on the Oxford comma, but again, that’s wrong. The court had resolved the ambiguity in the law in favor of the drivers, and the ongoing proceedings were to determine the facts of the case and what damages, if any, were to be awarded the drivers. The settlement puts an end to that process.

The story, in all its grammatical detail, as I wrote it on 17 March 2017:

ADS Word of the Year: fake news

Dave Wilton, Sunday, January 07, 2018

On 5 January, the American Dialect Society chose fake news as its 2017 Word of the Year. The ADS defined fake news as either “disinformation or falsehoods presented as real news” or “actual news that is claimed to be untrue.” The phrase was considered during the organization’s deliberations for the 2016 Word of the Year (WOTY), but in that year it was being used only in the first of these two senses. Donald Trump began using it in the second sense in 2017, and it is this sense that catapulted it into the top spot. As far as I know, this is the first time a word has been considered in multiple years. (The ADS uses an expansive definition of word, that of “vocabulary item,” which includes phrases, hashtags, and the like.)

food desert, food swamp

Dave Wilton, Friday, December 29, 2017

A food desert is an area, often an urban one, with poor access to food, especially nutritious food and fresh fruits and vegetables. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from a 1988 Australian newspaper:

New Caledonia, surely more of a food desert than anything outside five kilometres from the centre of Melbourne.

This citation may be something of an outlier. It refers to the Pacific island of New Caledonia, not an urban area in a developed nation, and it appears some eight years before food desert began to be used in earnest. Plus its use of “more of a” and the lack of quotation marks around the term hint that it is a straightforward metaphor rather than a term of art.

2017 Words of the Year (WOTY)

Dave Wilton, Saturday, December 23, 2017

As I did last year, and on occasion before that, I’ve come up with a list of words of the year. I do things a bit differently than other such lists in that I select twelve terms, one for each month. Since similar lists often exhibit a bias toward words that were in vogue at the end of the year when the list was compiled, my hope is that a monthly list will highlight words that were significant earlier in the year. The list is skewed by an American perspective, but since I’m American (and a Texan to boot), them’s the breaks.

I’m interpreting word loosely, including phrases, abbreviations, hashtags, and the like. The selected words are not necessarily new, but they are (mostly) associated with their respective month, either coming to widespread attention during it or associated with some event that happened then.

Do you think that Ring Around The Rosie makes reference to the Black Death? Or that the whole nine yards refers to WWII machinegun ammo belts? Or that Eskimos have 500 words for snow? If so, you need the Word Myths book. Find out more.